Such were the conclusions we immediately leapt to, until some
astronomers and Russian Defense Ministry officials burst our bubbles with the assurance that it was just an intercontinental ballistic missile (codenamed "Bulava") gone haywire. Boy, are we ever relieved. Here's a video, courtesy Gizmodo, offering an explanation for the spiral pattern:

This
might be one of the coolest-looking military-created whoopsies we've
seen in a while, but it's by no means the first. We submit to you a
brief (and no doubt very incomplete) rundown of the last century's Unidentified
Federally-funded Objects ... and other bizarre phenomena we couldn't
resist writing about:

1934: Disc-shaped aircraft. Miami University of Ohio develops the Roundwing aircraft, also
known as the Nemeth Umbrellaplane or "Flying Saucer." By the time WWII rolled around, the US
military started prototyping their own flying saucers, perhaps most
notably the Vought Flying Flapjack.
Turns out, the design wasn't terribly aerodynamic, so they scrapped it ... but not before spooking a few Long Island Sound beachgoers in 1947
-- one more splash in that year's "UFO Wave." (And even though it's
more conceptual than anything, for sheer awesomeness points, you can't
beat Alexander Weygers's Discopter, patented in 1943.)

The Battle of Los Angeles

1942: The Battle of Los Angeles.
Less than three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, strange light
blobs prompted California to launch a massive anti-aircraft artillery
barrage against the threat, fearing it to be another Japanese raid.
Later, however, the blobs were largely deemed nothing more than a case
of "war nerves." The military offered a few contradictory statements;
the true nature of the incident remains unknown. (Early balloon bombs, maybe?)

Richard A. Muller explains Project Mogul and its ties to Roswell

1947: The Roswell incident. OK, sure, there's no hoarier UFO cliche than Roswell, but we bet that -- unless you're a card-carrying MUFON
member -- you could use a refresher on the details. Quick recap: In 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release (!)
stating that they'd recovered a "flying disk" that supposedly crash-landed onto
a nearby ranch. Cue media frenzy. The Air Force countered by making
soothing noises about weather balloons, and the incident was all but
forgotten until 1978. That's when former nuclear physicist and
ufologist Stanton T. Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer who'd apparently recovered the "shiny" wreckage (described as
"pieces of rubber, super-resistant tinfoil,
wooden sticks, and what appeared to be I-beams of metallic-looking
material") and decried the weather balloon story as a bogus cover-up.
And from there, surely aided in no small part by post-Watergate anti-government
paranoia, the story became the paranormal-research juggernaut we know
today. In 1994, 50 years after the incident (and right when The X-Files was hitting its stride), the Air Force published a report concluding that the Roswell findings were debris from a flamed-out high-altitude-balloon launched as part of the top-secret Project Mogul.

1997: The Phoenix Lights.
It all started with a V-shaped light about the "size of a (Boeing)
747," according to one eyewitness, starting in Nevada and hurtling
toward Arizona. Since then, there have been other UFO-ish phenomena in
the area, including one notable incident in 2007, which at least one Air Force official confirmed to be a Barry Goldwater Range training exercise that involved dropping flares from planes to light up targets below. (Actually, 2007 yielded a bumper crop of these sightings. Nostalgia for the MIB-happpy '90s, perhaps.)

Fox News on the Stephenville Sightings

2008: The Stephenville sightings.
In January of 2008, initially dozens -- and later, hundreds -- of
Texas residents reported UFOs. Descriptions varied wildly, from discs to
flying V's to airborne objects the size of a football field. After a bit
of hemming and hawing, the Air Force eventually took credit for the phenomena, blaming F-16 fighter jet maneuvers for the disturbance.